Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Soviet America

Well, it's election day once again in America and once again I am going to exercise the one meaningful freedom still open to me this day as a citizen of the empire. Despite now being retired and having the whole day to go and "enjoy the franchise" that "brave men (and a few women)" have supposedly "fought and died for," I am instead going to assert my right to not participate in what has become a meaningless holographic (and as the late George Carlin put it: masturbatory) excercise.

We as American citizens may live in a virtual one party state, so under the political control of oligarchs that electoral "change" has become virtually meaningless, but the one thing that separates us from the denizens of the old Soviet Union, or any other totalitarian system that insisted upon having sham elections in a desperate attempt to provide the illusion of legitimacy and democracy, is that we still have the right to not participate--and what's more we won't be fined, imprisoned or fired from our jobs for holding up a stiff middle finger of refusal on election day. Deliberately NOT voting and thus withholding legitimacy, however slightly, from the whole corrupt American political, business and media establishment, is in these "interesting times" the only sensible thing a citizen can still do on election day.

The Democrats have apparently finally given up my support, because I no longer receive solicitations from that corrupt and worthless party asking for money. My dad still does however, and he told me that most of the correspondence directed at him by the Donkeys this year menacingly intones how awful it will be if they lose and the Republicans take control of the Senate. And that's ALL Pelosi, Reid, Biden and Obama (whose names appear on the solicitations) dare to argue with their pleas--there is not one mention from these dubious party "leaders" of just what their party will actually DO if it manages to hold onto the Senate. I think we've seen perfectly well during the current political alignment of the past four years exactly what they will do if they manage to hang on to their slim Senate majority--effectively nothing but continue to allow the billionaires to line their pockets at the expense of everyone else.

There has been a little bit of excitement in the press this election cycle about the unusual number of independent candidates who might actually win their races this time around, as if this is a development of any real significance. It isn't, because even if all of those non-affiliated candidates win they each will be asked to caucus with the two major parties, and they all will with one or the other. For if they don't they won't be allowed to sit on any of the committees that slice up the bacon for distribution to the folks back home. And NOBODY, however well intentioned they may be to begin with, spends the time, effort and money it takes to get elected to congress just so they can become an ineffectual one termer. Nope, before these newbies even move the furniture into their new offices outside their office doors will be lines of lobbyists just waiting to tell them which way to vote and when, and schooling them on how the thoroughly corrupted Washington system really works.

In post-Citizens United America especially, elections have become as big a sham as they were in the old Soviet Union--the one difference being that the voters who went to the polls pre-1991 in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan, etc., unlike most of the voters in America today, likely suffered from no illusions that their votes had any real meaning whatsoever.